I winterized 1277 mg of the above pictured material in 15 ml of Everclear 190 proof hoping to dry it out to better solidify it. 2½ days at -6° F then freezer filtered it through a buchner with Whatman #1 paper. This caught 150 mg of lipids.
I let the ethanol evaporate off at 90° F then vacuumed at the same temperature. The only major change is it's even more gooey than it was prior. It used to fracture like glass at refrigerated temperature. Now it merely bends at the same temperature and you have to drop it very quickly to get loose from it.
So what's the trick to making something that's hard and stable at room temperature? I'm thinking maybe my source material wasn't dry enough and/or I boiled off the butane under extreme high humidity conditions. Any validity to these guesses? Another guess is I used too much butane in my closed column. I used two cans both times but the second washes produced produced very little colored fluid. Is one 5-10 minute wash with one can per oz enough when using a closed column?
I'll be running another 1 oz batch next week. (Frozen column and material/cooled butane) The clipped up source material has been drying (very slowly) for days at 45% humidity. There's nothing I can do about the outdoor humidity for the initial butane purge but I wonder if there's some sort of practical upper limit for a successful shatter run. I can't visualize the humidity dropping much below 80% any time soon.
Thanks for any advice offered.
Don’t winterize without a rotovap ever in my advice. And shatter is strain dependent, I promise you this. It depends on a lot of things mostly terpene profile. Are they hydrophobic or hydrophilic
terpenes? Some
terpenes allow for the stable state of shatter, which is thca,
terpenes, and minor cannabinoids all locked into a very stable state. If you have a closed loop and are dewaxing properly and still not getting shatter, and you’re purging correctly at low enough temps. Its because the terps,
terpenes are Hydrocarbons! Aren’t the ones you need! I know for a fact the indoor ATF hydro I grow will shatter everytime. But my GG4 tested out at 95% and wouldn’t shatter if my life depended on it. Most people don’t know that.